


The Denier of Love

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 00:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10978815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: Answer to the writing prompt "[WP] All humans are immortal until they find their "soulmate," after which they age regularly. You, however, have been around since the Ice Age..."





	The Denier of Love

My assisstant wore a mask. It was a tasteful black affair, thin and breathable, but it completely obscured her face. Likewise she dressed in a long black burqa that draped to the floor, and when she spoke, it was through an electronic device that obscured all identity. In this state it was impossible for anyone to truly meet her: she was anonymous. She had a husband too, of course, and I had great confidence that he was her soul mate. In order to hire someone for so sensetive a position, of course I made sure that she was aging as all those who have bonded to their soul mates do. Husbands can die though, and it would have been entirely possible that we would have imprinted upon one another in that event. Moreover, I considered it a basic sort of decency to not expose my guests to chance, and given that I required those in my presence to wear similar garb, it was also a matter of avoiding hypocrisy (or the appearance of it). I did not wear a mask; everyone already knew who I was.

My current guest was also an employee. She -- gender was not a risk factor -- was known to me only by a hexadecimal identifier, which in turn was linked to a his body of work. I did not know what she looked or sounded like, though my organization of course had all that data should we have need of it. I knew that she had not yet found her soulmate. Given her importance as a researcher, I was thankful for that. It meant that even if she found her soulmate, she might have another forty years of productivity ahead of her, assuming that the radical changes which accompanied true love allowed her to remain of sound mind.

"It looks like we can safely do away with most of the precautions we currently use," said 0075BCD15. "For example, name alone isn't enough for an imprint, nor is a combination of name and non-personal information."

"What constitutes personal information?" I asked. This was all in the report that she had written, but I had only read the abstract, precisely because of the question I was posing her. I read a large amount, of course, but it was filtered through algorithms that stripped the pieces of identity, metaphor, anecdotes, or anything else I thought might cause an imprint. Longer or more complicated works, like this study, I mostly skipped.

"The line is, admittedly, somewhat blurred," said 0075BCD15. "This study was the largest of its kind, but even with a million participants there are problems with diving too deeply into the data. The sticking point appears to be with those people who invest themselves heavily into their work. We asked participants to rate themselves on occupational satisfaction, occupational importance, and a few other related matters. There were a few instances of imprinting where exposure was through name and strictly professional writing sample, and even one in which professional writing sample alone caused it. I'll have a write-up with those case studies in a week or two, but I think it would suffice to say that in these cases the professional writing happens to be entirely personal. Again, if you slice the large sample down too far, you're left with only vanishingly small amounts of information. And of course there are confounding factors, like those who choose not to self-report that they have fallen in love, even with the incentive program we offered."

"So the hypothesis, as yet unproven, is that I could freely read any report that human resources gives me, save for that which was written by someone whose soul was revealed to me through such a report?" I asked.

"I might not put it like that," said 0075BCD15. "You realize that we're going to have to run a whole new study if we want concrete answers to these questions? I had hoped that second directional testing would help, but it appears that's not the case."

"What was the complicating factor?" I asked.

"It's detailed in section 5." Annoyance seeped through the electronic masking. "The protocol called for us to test in batches, which would expose respondents to each other unidirectionally. Alice falls in love with Bob, but since Bob is not exposed to Alice, her love is unrequited. That was meant to allow a far greater amount of testing on Bob, since we would know precisely who his soulmate was and could therefore do more in-depth testing on what would trigger him." She sighed. "The problem is that unidirectionality is apparently a myth. Once Alice falls in love, it takes far less information transfer for Bob to fall in love with Alice. We're basically looking at a totally different set of criteria once one direction has been established. It actually threw a wrench into the experimental model as a whole and took an enormous amount of work to untangle the data in order to make it usable."

"I am more at risk if my soulmate has imprinted upon me?" I asked. My breath caught in my throat. I had toned it down some in recent years, but my position as leader had made my face one of the most recognizable in the world. Soulmates had found me before, but they were always dealt with by my people, tucked half a world away under armed guard without me so much as knowing their names.

"It would appear that you are at considerable risk, yes," said 0075BCD15. "And as long as we're on the subject of risk, and given that you haven't yet read the paper in-depth, I should also say that our tracking of psychographic changes shows that age is a complicating factor in personality drift. For someone who has been around for ten thousand years ... well, we didn't have any in the study, but I would expect the alteration to be profound."

I rubbed my face while 0075BCD15 waited patiently. It was at that moment that I heard the sound of conversation from outside my office door. Half the conversation was muted and electronic. The other half was not. I immediately pushed the button for security; paranoia had been my watchword for a very long time. My hand gently rested on the gun holstered beneath my desk.

"Is something wrong?" asked 0075BCD15.

Before I could answer, the door burst open and three people came in, two with automatic rifles drawn and pointed right at me. The fourth had a camera, no doubt broadcasting out to the world. My secretary was nowhere to be seen.

"Behold the denier of love," said one of the men with guns. He said it for the benefit of the camera, I was sure.

"Have you come to execute me, like you did to Hollings and Brook?" I asked. It was now a game of stalling for time, though the fact that they had penetrated so far past my defenses said nothing good for the state of my security. If I lived through this, I would have to spend weeks of time figuring out how it had happened.

The one who had spoken before pulled off his mask and let his burqa fall to the floor. He was handsome, in his own way, but already marked by age, with wrinkles by his eyes and grey touching his temples. I didn't know his name, though anonymized reports of him had come across my desk. His codename was Masque. I had no particular response to his appearance, and breathed a sigh of relief; he was not my soulmate.

"What did you do before the age of vocoders and masks?" he asked, ignoring the question I had posed. He had a script, it seemed, and was sticking to it. "Was it really so bad to open yourself to love?"

"I lived in fear," I replied. "I had watched people grow decrepit and die. Now the time for fear has passed, save for the few radicals who still remain. Those who seek love are free to find it." I carefully gestured to 0075BCD15. "We've recently completed the largest study of true love in the modern world. How many couples did we help to find one another?"

"Seventy-eight thousand," answered 0075BCD15.

"Yet you think yourself too good for it," said Masque.

"Frankly, yes," I replied. "I cannot fathom that sixty years with my soulmate would possibly measure up against an eternity of life."

"A life you spend as an ascetic," he spat. "A life devoid of joy, no music for fear you will fall in love with the player, no movies for fear an actress will catch your eye. No sex, no children."

"So you will kill me because you disagree with my values?" I asked.

"The loveless control too much," he said. "They force lovelessness on others."

I could admit that was true, though not on camera. The direction of the corporate parliament was largely a result of my views, and those of my peers. To say that though would invite protests and extremists. Even with a gun to my head I looked to the future. I had thousands of years of training in the long view of things. It also wasn't the first time my life was threatened. I touched the gun beneath my desk again, brushing against it with my fingers only lightly. Was security coming at all?

"Did killing Hollings or Brook make the world a better place?" I asked. "Or even failing that, did it make the world different?" I had read through public opinion surveys; even the lovers were against these terrorists. There had been no movement for a few years, so I thought perhaps the extremists had gotten the message and decided to avoid blowback. Apparently not.

"No, Hollings and Brook accomplished nothing," he answered. I didn't expect that. "The system of power is too entrenched, and there are too many men and women who have lived too long, each ready to take their place."

I was watching him closely now.

"We don't intend to kill you," Masque continued. "We intend to unite you with your true love."

I laughed. "I have had many soulmates," I replied. "Hundreds if not thousands, over the years. You are fed the lie that there is only one person for you in the world. The truth is that there are many, always a backup should something happen to the first or second. And I know where my true love is."

"On the island of Elemere, secured away behind several layers of armed guards, a place where cameras are forbidden, from which no information can flow," he said. I clenched my knuckles. He wasn't supposed to have known that. "All pictures of her destroyed, all traces of her cleaned up by your crews, the information kept away from you, so desperate were you to avoid reciprocation."

"No," I croaked. "I don't want her. Please." I screwed my eyes shut, in case they had a picture. My mind was racing, but it was only covering the things that I should have done rather than what I could do in the present moment. I touched the gun beneath my desk again. Security, it was clear, was not coming.

"Cutting off the head is fruitless," Masque said. He was playing to his camera again. "Conversion is the answer. When we got Brooks, we also managed to escape with his files on his competitors." I heard footsteps coming toward me as Masque continued. "Of course, the hard part was your island, with its myriad defenses. Brooks had no ideas, but we saw the flaw. You were constantly advertising for your soul mate, looking for her so you could lock her down and keep her far away. All we had to do was wait for the right spike in your network traffic, the one that would show you expected a new one to be found."

I saw it then. The island was a masterwork, designed so that no one could escape, crafted to be a black box from which nothing could escape. But it supposed that we'd gotten the right woman. If they had the perfect candidate, someone who could plausibly be my new soulmate, someone who had very recently fallen in love so that she could pass the aging tests, someone willing to spend years away from her true love ... then my soulmate would be out in the world, ready to be used against me.

I felt a slight wind and opened my eyes by reflex. Standing in front of me, holding a camera ... well, I can't describe her with any objectivity. She was beautiful, precious, with ringlets of blonde hair that were slightly damp with sweat, flawless skin, a wide smile on her face, red lips that I wanted to kiss more than anything else in the world, achingly beautiful. All the flowery metaphors I'd ever heard suddenly made sense. Every description of classical beauty could be applied to her. I wanted to have children with her, to grow old together, to unfold the earth. How could I have thought that eternity could compare to even an hour without her?

I fell in love, and suddenly nothing else mattered.


End file.
